Rally draws small 'shutdown' crowd

At a tea party rally outside the Capitol Thursday, the pressures facing Republican leadership as it navigates a budget impasse were on full display.

Tea party leaders and Republican politicians repeated similar talking points — that they did not want the government to shut down and that the onus was on Senate Democrats to finalize a deal that would keep the government funded through the rest of the fiscal year.

Story Continued Below

The only problem? Whenever they pushed to avoid a shutdown, the crowd of roughly 200 people kept getting in the way.

“They say if we go to a government shutdown, we need to make sure that everyone knows it’s the tea party’s fault,” Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin said, characterizing the Democratic strategy to the crowd.

She was met with shouts of “Yeah, that’s right, it is!” and “Shut it down!” before she was able to finish, saying, “A government shutdown is Congress’s fault!”

When Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) told the protesters that “nobody wants the government to shut down, but if we don’t take a stand, we’re going to shut down the future of our children and grandchildren,” he was interrupted by a tea partier yelling, “Yes we do!”

That was the difficulty for conservative leaders outside and within the nation’s capital as the clock ticks on a continuing resolution set to expire next week and the national media and partisans from both sides closely watching their every move. How do they hold firm on a fight they think they’re winning without allowing the Democrats to paint them as extremists?

Pence, for one, was greeted with raucous cheers when he later told the crowd: “If liberals in the Senate want to play games and shut down government rather than make a down payment on fiscal discipline, I say shut it down.” Tea party regulars Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) encouraged the crowd to not back down on the spending fight. “We can’t afford anything less than a fight on these important issues,” Bachmann said. “They want the government to shut down and to turn you into their scapegoats and say it’s the tea party’s fault for shutting the government down. Now the cat is out of the bag. Now we know who has no interest in negotiating — it’s Harry Reid, it’s the big libs over in the Senate.”

At the center of the budget battle are the 87 freshman Republicans the tea party feels partly responsible for electing: a class so big that any unified opposition from them would significantly hamstring Republican leaders’ efforts to make a deal, risking a shutdown and the backlash it could prompt.

But if the freshmen were feeling the pressure, they didn’t let it show. Several addressed the crowd, including Reps. Joe Walsh of Illinois, Raul Labrador of Idaho, Tom Graves of Georgia, Jeff Duncan of South Carolina and Allen West of Florida. After he addressed the crowd, West referred to a spending cut compromise in the range of $30 billion floated by Democrats as “unacceptable.” One rookie senator, Rand Paul, spoke to the group with Sen. Jim DeMint.